Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

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NEW YORK TIMES FINANCIAL COLUMNIST SHOWS DREADFUL LACK OF COMMON SENSE, by Charles Carreon

03/17/09

The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Published: March 16, 2009

Do we really have to foot the bill for those bonuses at the American International Group?

It sure does sting. A staggering $165 million — for employees of a company that nearly took down the financial system. And heck, we, the taxpayers, own nearly 80 percent of A.I.G.

It doesn’t seem fair.

So here is a sobering thought: Maybe we have to swallow hard and pay up, partly for our own good. I can hear the howls already, so let me explain.

Everyone from President Obama down seems outraged by this. The president suggested on Monday that we just tear up those bonus contracts. He told the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, to use every legal means to recoup taxpayers’ money. Hard to argue there.

“This isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents,” he said. “It’s about our fundamental values.”

On that last issue, lawyers, Wall Street types and compensation consultants agree with the president. But from their point of view, the “fundamental value” in question here is the sanctity of contracts.

That may strike many people as a bit of convenient legalese, but maybe there is something to it. If you think this economy is a mess now, imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start abrogating contracts left and right.

As much as we might want to void those A.I.G. pay contracts, Pearl Meyer, a compensation consultant at Steven Hall & Partners, says it would put American business on a worse slippery slope than it already is. Business agreements of other companies that have taken taxpayer money might fall into question. Even companies that have not turned to Washington might seize the opportunity to break inconvenient contracts.

If government officials were to break the contracts, they would be “breaking a bond,” Ms. Meyer says. “They are raising a whole new question about the trust and commitment organizations have to their employees.” (The auto industry unions are facing a similar issue — but the big difference is that there is a negotiation; no one is unilaterally tearing up contracts.)

But what about the commitment to taxpayers? Here is the second, perhaps more sobering thought: A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave — the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to — they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.’s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it.

So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats, if only to prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.

Not that any of this takes the bite out of paying these bonuses. For better or worse — in this case, worse — someone at A.I.G. decided this company needed to sign bonus agreements last year to keep people before the full extent of its problems became clear.

Now we can debate why A.I.G. felt it necessary to guarantee seven executives at least $3 million apiece when the economy was clearly on shaky ground. Perhaps we will find out these contracts were a bit of sleight of hand to enrich executives who knew this financial Titanic had hit the iceberg. But another possible explanation is that A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

That is the explanation offered by Edward M. Liddy, who was installed as A.I.G.’s chief executive when the government effectively nationalized the company last fall. (He is being paid $1 a year.)

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff” the company “if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he said.

There’s some truth to what Mr. Liddy is saying. Would you want to work at A.I.G.? Sure, maybe for $3 million. But not if you could go somewhere else for even more — or even much less.

“The jobs are terrible,” said Robert M. Sedgwick, an executive compensation lawyer at Morrison Cohen who represents a number of employees of banks that have taken government money. “You have to read about yourself in the paper every day. These people are leaving as soon as they can.”

Let them leave, you say. Where would they go, given the troubles in the financial industry? But the fact is, the real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests.

“The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited,” Ms. Meyer says.

Of course, if taxpayers had not bailed out A.I.G., these contracts would not be worth anything. Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, made the point on Monday, when he subpoenaed A.I.G. for the names of the people who received the bonuses. If A.I.G. had spiraled into bankruptcy, its employees would have had to get in line with other unsecured creditors.

Mr. Cuomo wants to know who A.I.G.’s lucky employees are, and how they have been doing at their jobs. So here is a suggestion for him. Get the list, and give those big earners at A.I.G. a not-so-subtle nudge: Perhaps they will “volunteer” to give some of their bonuses back or watch their names hit the newspapers. But in the meantime, despite how offensive and painful it might be, let’s honor the contracts.

With his article The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G. , New York Times financial columnist Andrew Sorkin elicited my ire. I actually wrote him an email, and you can do likewise at this link. Or you can just read my strident reply below, that quotes the salient points of his meritless arguments, and tell him you agree with Charles Carreon.


New York Times Financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin apologist for AIG

1. “This isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents,” he said. “It’s about our fundamental values.” *** the “fundamental value” in question here is the sanctity of contracts. ***If government officials were to break the contracts, they would be “breaking a bond,” Ms. Meyer says.

Contracts are only sacred if they are entered into voluntarily with full understanding of their consequences. The anger of the public is not “buyer’s remorse;” rather, it is justified rebellion against having terms imposed upon them by an AIG management that obtained money under false pretenses and used it for purposes that, if fully known, neither Congress nor the voters would have agreed to. Therefore, these contracts are voidable because of a defect in their formation, i.e., fraud or a mistake as to material terms known exclusively to one party – AIG.

2. A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

“prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.”

This contention is downright silly. Nothing is being “unwound.” AIG has just been paying off its “counterparties,” and in many cases, according to the New York Times, under circumstances where nothing was due under the “Credit Default Swap” insurance policies that AIG had issued. This is insurance malpractice, if you think about it – as if my insurance company gave me a check for the value of my wrecked vehicle because their statistics suggested I was likely to have a wreck someday. These people “turned against the company” long ago by digging the financial hole it is now in. They need to be turned out of their offices by any means less drastic that actual defenestration.

3. A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff” the company “if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he said.

Excuse me, but funding the operation of AIG provided these bonus-grabbers with a subsidy for salaries that would simply have evaporated in insolvency. Being subsidized is not being subjected to “continued and arbitrary adjustment.” Your uncritical repetition of this bilge is bizarre. Since when did the New York Times turn “garbage in, garbage out” into a journalistic maxim?

4. [T]he real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests.

The “real moneymakers” seems like a strange definition for people who lost billions of other people’s money. Perhaps you could get a job as a meaning distorter for Fox News.

1. Perhaps they will “volunteer” to give some of their bonuses back or watch their names hit the newspapers. But in the meantime, despite how offensive and painful it might be, let’s honor the contracts.

Are you deranged? Your solicitousness toward these robber barons has utterly undermined your credibility as a commentator. You are a handsome man, as depicted on the New York Times website, and thus must come from a good family. If you will send me your email address, I will paypal you a dime, like Prof. Kingsfield in Paper Chase, so you can call your parents and tell them that there is grave doubt you will make a real financial reporter.

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OBAMA, OUR NEW "WAR PRESIDENT," VIOLATES THE CONSTITUTION BY FIGHTING THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT OF HABEAS CORPUS, by Charles Carreon

04/11/09

Obama made many promises, three of which I remember clearly — to restore civil rights stolen by Bushman, end the looting on Wall Street, and bring the troops home from Iraq. In a word, “change.” Looking at the results achieved in the last three months on all three fronts, it appears that Americans have been taken for chumps, because if what we’ve got is change, it’s surprisingly indistinguishable from the same old-same old, as our charismatic leader would put it. Today, I’m going to talk about how he’s chosen to continue as our “war president,” and why he should change course now, for the good of the nation.

The Evil of Arbitrary Arrest Under The Tyrannical Authority of “General Warrants” and “Bills of Attainder”

Until you have been subjected to it, you can hardly imagine the terrors inflicted by despots using brute force to arrest and imprison people without cause. I have represented people who were arrested and imprisoned on false charges, but even that does not compare to being arrested for no reason whatsoever. People arrested for no reason naturally fear that they may never be released. Certainly, those detained for no reason are much more likely to be tortured and killed in secret. After all, if you can be arrested for no reason, why would you need a reason to go farther, and commit torture, or simply eliminate the problem? Lots of people like to say it was taxes that caused the revolution, but I suspect unlawful detention was by far the more powerful driver of rebellion. The Declaration of Independence accused King George of a “long train of abuses” against the American colonists, among them:

Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

King George’s royally-appointed judges would issue “Writs of Assistance,” which were “general warrants” that could be used to arrest anyone without cause and haul them to London for questioning and bogus “trials” without jury. Can you imagine the horror of being taken out of your home for no reason, and put on a sailing ship, seeing the shore of your native land disappearing beyond the horizon? This power, or even the threat of it, would often be used to extract testimony against friends, neighbors and relatives, who would then be arrested on charges of sedition, or other generalized offenses. Obviously, for any person not desirous of living in prison, unlawful detention in itself is mental torture, and many a bird will sing whatever song will spring them from the cage.

The danger of permitting detention without probable cause to believe the person committed a crime was thus dealt with by enacting the Fourth Amendment. On April 30, 2002, U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin dismissed a Grand Jury indictment that had been issued based on testimony from a person who had been detained under what she characterized as a general warrant issued “for investigative purposes.” The Judge’s opinion is beautiful, as are the citations she chooses from the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stanford v. Texas, that it is my patriotic pleasure to share with you:

“Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans,” for example, “were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists.” Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 481 (1965). Those general warrants were viewed “as the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book, because they placed the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Id. (quotation marks omitted). As a result, in December 1791, the Bill of Rights became “the supreme Law of the Land.” U.S. Const. art. VI cl. 2.

The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. U.S. Const. amend. IV.

“These words are precise and clear. They reflect the determination of those who wrote the Bill of Rights that the people of this new Nation should forever ‘be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects’ from intrusion and seizure by officers acting under the unbridled authority of a general warrant.” Stanford, 379 U.S. at 481 (emphasis added).

General Warrants were issued by anti-sedition magistrates operating in the colonies as judicial agents of repression. The British Parliament, in an anti-terrorist mood similar to that of our post-911 Congress, also took a hand in fighting the enemies of the Crown. They used a special type of law to demonize political enemies, called “Bills of Attainder.” The word “attainder” derives from the word “attainted,” as in “ostracised” or “damned.” A Bill of Attainder was a law that named specific individuals and deprived those people of their civil rights — the right to trial on the charges of which they were accused. A Bill of Attainder telescoped the entire prosecution into a single decree.

Under English law, a criminal condemned for a serious crime … could be declared “attainted”, meaning that his civil rights were nullified: he could no longer own property or pass property to his family by will or testament. His property could consequently revert to the Crown…. Bills of attainder were sometimes criticized as a convenient way for the King to convict subjects of crimes and confiscate their property without the bother of a trial—and without the need for a conviction or indeed any evidence at all. Wikipedia.

To the preceding we might add that not only would an “attainted” person and his children be deprived of property, he could be deprived of his freedom, jailed in the Tower for nothing more than being the victim of a legislative decree that “Mr. X is a felonious criminal.” Along with “ex post facto” laws that criminalize past conduct, Bills of Attainder were made unlawful by Article I, Sec. 3, Clause 9 of the United States Constitution, which states: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto shall be passed.”

Because a Bill of Attainder is so clearly unlawful, Congress is careful not to name anyone directly as a target of its laws, but after the Bush coup, the Congress end-ran the Constitution in a three-step process. First, they created the category of “terrorist organizations” for which no clear definition existed, and told the Treasury make a list of “terrorist organizations.” Second, they made it unawful to “provide support” for a terrorist organization — which of course could be anything up to and including holding a bake sale for Chechnian orphans. Third, they created the category of “unlawful combatants,” and gave the Decider the absolute power to decide who was an “unlawful combatant,” a definition that had nothing to do with any objective evidence, and was justified simply on the bald assertion that the Decider was in fact the Decider.

By designating people as “terrorists” or “unlawful combatants,” using standards so broad that anyone could be made subject to the law, and depriving those people of civil rights, the U.S. Congress created a Bill of Attainder that was worse than the original — basically a blank check for the CIA to run anyone into its secret prisons, where, as we now know, they would be delivered into the hands of interrogators who had been told it was lawful to commit torture. I do believe I will indulge myself in a colloquialism — this is Scary Shit.

The “Great Writ” of Habeas Corpus

Ironically, like so much in our jurisprudence, the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus evolved from the exercise of monarchical power for elitist reasons. It happened like this. Mayhap a young nobleman making sport with his noble pals breaketh into a humble cottage, and there before God and nature and her horrified family, drunkenly debaucheth a comely lass, and in the ensuing affray, killeth her brother. A local magistrate clapeth the young lord into irons. The wayward noble’s father approacheth a courtier with silver in hand who then approacheth the King and explaineth the true state of affairs, and that a grievous wrong hath been committed upon a highborn titled male who hath indulged in high spirits and defended his noble person with his cavalry blade against felonious assaults by a commoner. The King findeth his Royal Person affronted by the detention of one to whom He is related by a close degree of consanguinity, and in consequence therof issueth a writ of Habeas Corpus directing the errant magistrate henceforth to “produce the body” of the imprisoned gallant, who is then delivered to a well-appointed judicial chamber and strictly questioned by a duly constituted court of handpicked, well-fed and bewigged legal lords, in consequence of which an acquittal ensueth and the chastened youth is released to the custody of his family with the exhortation to keep his spirits in check lest justice be not in future so merciful. The King’s peace was thus restored. From such ignoble beginnings came the writ of habeas corpus.

Clever lawyers gradually expanded it into a judicial remedy for unexplained detentions in general. They are still issued by the federal courts in an antiquated by effective form, as follows:

We command you that the body of Charles L. Craig, in your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his caption and detention, you safely have before Honorable Martin T. Manton, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Judicial Circuit, within the circuit and district aforesaid, to do and receive all and singular those things which the said judge shall then and there consider of him in this behalf; and have you then and there this writ.

Today the writ of habeas corpus is the plea of last resort, and is probably used most by death row defenders to challenge the amazingly unjust proceedings that result in the horrific statistics that have caused several states to suspend executions — lying witnesses, sleeping defense lawyers, phony forensic evidence, prejudice against minority defendants, the whole digusting snowball of injustice that gets rolling in the wake of a gruesome murder, claiming more victims, and leaving the true perpetrators free to kill again. Indeed, the right of habeas corpus for common criminals has not been curtailed. To be deprived of your sacred right to obtain judicial relief from unjust arrest and imprisonment, as in the time of King George, you need to be an Enemy of the State.

Three Towers Fall — One Cherished Right Dies, And Hundreds of “Unlawful Combatants” Are Born

http://archive.org/details/Three_Towers ... Tower_Fall

Congress and the Executive Branch have been acting like King George on steroids ever since the Three Towers came down on September 11th. Two months after thousands were killed in a mass murder for which only a single lone madman (Moussauwi) was prosecuted, on November 13, 2001 Bush granted himself the power to arrest anyone suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism as an “unlawful combatant,” to be held indefinitely without charges being filed against him or her, without a court hearing, and without access to a lawyer. Hundreds of people were declared unlawful combatants and held in abominable conditions in Guantanamo and in secret CIA prisons by the now-disgraced former President, who of course never saw them, or any evidence, or even knew their names. After the Supreme Court reaffirmed the right of United States citizens to seek writs of habeas corpus even if they had been declared “unlawful combatants” in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), Congress unlawfully overruled the Constitution by enacting Sec. 1005(e) of the Dept of Defense Appropriations Act of 2006, that provides:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), the Supreme Court rejected Congress’s attempts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals. Congress then enacted the Military Commissions Act, that amended the language above to replace habeas corpus with rigged proceedings that have been tainted by the use of tortured confessions as evidence and repudiated by military prosecutors themselves as virtual kangaroo courts:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

Three Branches of Government Collapse Into One “War President”

On January 17, 2007, Torturer General Alberto Gonzales, still allowed to spew noxious tyrannical propaganda in the halls of Congress in those days, told the Senate that the Constitution didn’t grant even American citizens the right of habeas corpus, calling it a “treasured gift” that the Decider could “decide” to suspend. Erwin Chemerinsky, a respected Constitutional law professor, took exception to Gonzales’ revisionist Constitutional history: “If there’s no habeas corpus, and if the government wants to pick you or me off the street and hold us indefinitely, how do we get our release?” Douglas Kmiec, a federal prosecutor under Reagan and Bush the First, agreed, stating that without habeas corpus: “one of the basic protections of human liberty against the powers of the state would be embarrassingly absent from our constitutional system.” Bruce Fein, another veteran of the Reagan-era Justice Department, said Gonzales was trying to “create the idea that during conflicts, the three branches of government collapse into one, and it is the president.” Yes, that means that in “wartime,” all we need is our dear old father-figure, calling the shots, imprisoning and torturing the bad guys, keeping us safe in our terrorized homeland, our beloved “War President.”

The Judges Finally Turn It Around

The judicial branch gave Bush enough rope to hang himself and everyone in the CIA, if someone had the courage to tie the other end to a stout tree limb. But eventually, they figured that we could maybe go ahead and restore civil rights. In Boumediene v. Bush June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court rejected that idea, holding that Guantanamo detainees have the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus in US Federal Court.

After the election, it seemed possible good news would come from the White House, and on January 21, 2009, Obama declared that the Guantanamo detainees “have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.” That, you might have thought, would be that. But not so fast.

Orwell Said It Would Be Like This

When District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina released 17 Chinese Uighurs in October 2008, who have been held at Guantanamo for no good reason for seven years, no one was surprised that the Bush Justice Department sought and obtained a stay of the ruling. What was surprising was when Obama’s Justice Department continued the same position. But of course, there was something difficult about that case, since no one knows where to send the Uighurs — China might just imprison them, and some people think they’re not good enough to stay in the US. But yesterday, April 10, 2009, the other shoe dropped, and there can now be now doubt that Obama has decided he too is a “War President” who can imprison anyone he likes without a warrant and without judicial recourse. Obama’s lawyers appealed District Judge John Bates’ decision to allow three men detained at Bargram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan to seek writs of habeas corpus. So people have the right of habeas corpus, except when they don’t.

Yes, Obama’s face points one way, and his feet walk the other way, in a posture he seems to adopt quite naturally. Power warps the psyche, and is almost impossible to renounce. Get ready for a new age of happy tyranny. It’s 1984 all over again.

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PORN SCHOOL, by Charles Carreon

04/19/09


 
You got kids? Or friends or relatives who have kids? You know, “kids” – those little people who haven’t grown up to be unemployed yet? When you’re a parent, you don’t have much choice about what to do with them during the daylight hours, when they’re not at home watching TV, playing video games, or posting to their mySpace page. You have to send them to school, so they can learn to follow the rules, how to fear authority, how to cower in the face of peer pressure, and how to experience increasing anxiety as testing day approaches and the time for procrastination diminishes. Without these skills, they will be naked before the world, and they may suffer disorientation when they see thieves rewarded with more money to steal, bullshit-artists turned into world leaders, and people who eat worms on television turned into reality stars.

And as a parent, you accept all this. You go to work yourself, if you can find it, and entrust your children to a claque of people called teachers who quack like ducks and reward the best quackers with high grades in quacking, and quack about how nice the quacking sounds when all the students quack in unison, and how cacophonous it is when they quack randomly and out of order. You accept all this, and you even pay taxes and school bonds so the teachers won’t go on strike and quack at you about how hard their jobs are and how mean kids are and how teachers just don’t get any respect.

But I tell you what you don’t do. You don’t expect your kid to come home and tell you that what they taught her in school today was how to strip. You particularly wouldn’t expect it if you lived in a Mormon community like Safford, Arizona, where the largest business is a Federal prison and the nearest strip bar is probably sixty miles away in Tucson across the street from the air base. But that’s what a couple of Safford parents discovered when their daughter came home from school one day a half-dozen years ago. She was just thirteen years old, a preppie kind of girl as she remembers it – a gentle little creature with tender feelings and a body just starting to turn to womanhood -- when she was called to the principal’s office and taught how to take it off.

There in school, where her parents couldn’t protect her, where those who were supposed to protect her had suddenly turned into sexual vampires indulging a sick impulse to leer and humiliate her, they made her take off her shoes, her skirt, her blouse, and then, they told to pull her bra away from her chest and move it side to side, and made her do the same with her panties. And oh, what were they looking for? Acid? Heroin? Crack? Crank? Switchblades? No, something far more dangerous. Something so dangerous, so likely to cause instantaneous derangement of the adolescent mind and senses that not a moment could be wasted. Yes. Ibuprophen.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! Ibuprophen is a powerful pain-reliever, just like Oxycontin and Vicodin, the drugs that turned Rush Limbaugh into the heartless monster that he is. Why do you think people take pain relievers, anyway? To numb themselves to the pain caused by injuring other people. It is hugely popular with bankers, politicians, bailout artists, and social vermin with inflamed consciences and headaches so big they just want to run away from their problems. So these Safford school administrators, they were combating an evil that might be too small for you to see, but they, being used to nipping trouble in the bud, were onto it early, protecting this young lady from herself, and protecting her schoolmates from her. Never mind that they found no ibuprophen – the word got around – there was no way to hide your Advil stash from these stern enforcers of adolescent virtue.

The good of the whole student body had to be considered. So when the young lady’s parents sued, the State of Arizona fought back – through trial, and appeal, and all the way up to the US Supreme Court – which is where it is now. That’s a lot of lawyer hours spent defending the right of school officials to get an intimate view of their students – a lot of taxpayer dollars – but once again, there are powerful factors at work that compel this type of government activity. I can hear Arizona's lawyer arguing right now: "It’s about the big picture, not just about one girl! This could open the floodgates of litigation, your Honor! It would incentivize parents to file lawsuits for money – filthy money – and expose the public treasury to being looted by every child who had to expose their genitals for the good of the school. And that would chill dedicated public servants in the performance of their duty to explore every nook and cranny when necessary to fight the scourge of Advil use now threatening the nation. Your values would have to be on upside down to not see where the real danger lies. After all, a young woman’s virginal assets aren’t tainted when viewed by people without prurient impulses, people who just want to find the Advil. But lawsuits – now there’s something dirty!"

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ARE NUCLEAR MISSILES OUR EASTER ISLAND STATUES?
by Charles Carreon
04/20/09



Everybody has heard about Easter Island, the place in the South Pacific where the inhabitants, all of Polynesian ancestry, became so obsessed with carving enormous stone statues that they exhausted the resources of the island, cut down all the large trees from which oceangoing canoes could be made, and ended up marooned on the island, unable to fish in the deep sea, trade with other islands, or otherwise maintain the high standard of living they had once enjoyed.

In Collapse – How Societies Fail, author Jared Diamond dug into the story in detail. The island was divided into pie-shaped territories governed by about seven or eight tribes that coexisted in a competitive balance. They didn’t want to have bloody wars, but they had to keep their populations busy with work that would prevent them from hatching plots to overthrow the tribal leaders. Tribal chiefs and priests competed to make ever larger statues, and it consumed a huge amount of slave labor to create and erect each one. When they couldn’t make them any bigger, they competed by placing a little hat of rare red stone at the very top. It must have placed a great strain on the people of the island, because the system broke down suddenly and irreparably all at once while the demented project was still in full swing. Out of a total of 887 statues on the island, 397 were still in production in the main quarry at Rano Rarak, while only 288, just 32% of the total, had been erected, and 92 were abandoned in transport by the slaves who decided to give up the process of hauling them up and down the steep volcanic ravines to their sacred destinations. In the quarry, tools were cast aside as if perhaps there was a sudden revolt. Too late to save the island ecology, however. The leaders who had lead the people into an economic boondoggle were deposed, but the revolutionaries didn’t have enough resources left to work with to save the society.

Ironically, the Easter Islanders were the descendants of heroic seafaring tribes who traversed thousands of miles of open water in outrigger dugouts to reach the remote island. But the civilization they created so depleted the island’s resources that they couldn’t even find enough trees to build their traditional dugouts, and by the time westerners arrived to discover them, their numbers had dwindled to a couple of hundred, and they had descended into cannibalism, watched over and mocked by the stone abominations hewn by their short-sighted, overcompetitive ancestors.

I live in Tucson, Arizona, where the US Air Force housed 18 Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Nuclear Missiles for many years. And I was born in 1956, in the heat of the cold war, when the nation’s military superiority to Soviet Russia was a constant topic of discussion, and people who had bomb shelters really seemed to have an advantage over the rest of us, who didn’t even have basements. Everyone had seen the movies of houses and buildings being swept away by the shockwave, and we lived in real fear. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe were the big hits of the day. As Dr. Strangelove reminds us, during those years, there was at least one squadron of nuclear armed B52 bombers in the air every day, all day long, refueling in mid-air so that if need be, our nation would not be late to Armageddon.

If nuclear bombs were going to revolutionize warfare, the results have been underwhelming. Ever since the other guys got them, our nation has not gotten close to using them. Truman directed them dropped on the Japanese only because they could not retaliate in kind and the window of opportunity to ever use them without fear of igniting the apocalypse was closing. He knew that the Russians were going to get them soon, and he wanted to show that the US was not afraid to incinerate 200,000 people in one day. It was now or never. “Give ‘em hell Harry” sure as hell did. Interestingly, of all the nations clamoring to obtain nuclear weapons, the Japanese have never been among them.

The fact is nuclear bombs are not real “weapons.” A weapon is something you can use to destroy your enemy. If it destroys you simultaneously, it’s not a weapon, it’s a suicide device. Imagine calling up a gun company, like Glock, or Ruger, or Remington, and you say, to their product development people, “I have a great idea for a new weapon.” They’re like, “Okay, how does it work.” And you’re all, “It’s great. You pull the trigger, and it simultaneously kills your enemy and you.” They’re like, “That’s not a weapon, you idiot. Who would we sell it to? The police? They would have to hire a whole new police force every time there was a shootout.” But that’s what nuclear weapons are – mass suicide devices, and that’s why we’ve never used them but twice, on a defenseless nation of non-Caucasians.

No, the only purpose for having a nuclear arsenal is for the same reason the Easter Island chiefs built their big statues – because the other tribes had them. People wonder at the excess megatonnage that we have – enough to blow the crust off the earth I once heard, or to knock it off its rotational axis I heard another time – at any rate, far more than any usable amount. Indeed, a much more efficient way to deal with this would be to allow the Russians to actually place their bomb right in Washington D.C., and the US could place one in Moscow, and we’d have an equally effective balance of terror. That would of course be altogether too raw a way of imposing a balance of terror, though, as if Kruschev and Kennedy had just decided to sit down, snort lines of crank and toss off shooter of vodka, and play Russian roulette with a snub nose thirty eight.

So instead, we create these incredibly sophisticated machines. With solid fuel rockets that will nearly put the missile in orbit, with inertial guidance systems that are supposed to enable the things to fly fifteen thousand miles and hit a city, and all stuffed with the rarest of all metals, put together by the most intelligent engineers, and creating toxic waste all along the way. Then we stuff these gigantic pillars of military symbolism in holes in the ground and they sit there. And sit there. And sit there.

You know, they’ve been sitting there so long, the last thing you’d want to do would be to launch one. I mean, would you want to rely on a car built in the fifties or sixties? Would you buy a computer built in the eighties? I mean stuff gets old, and rockets, well they aren’t so f’n reliable in the first place. About every seventh time they launched a space shuttle, it blew up. And with the missiles, they never really tested them extensively. They couldn’t. “Hey Moscow, let us see if we can hit you with a target missile. Just a dud, y’know. Practice our aim.”

No, these suckers were just a big Easter Island scam from the get-go. We took all this time and resources, and built and built and built, and guess what, it had the same result. While our engineers were building missies, they weren’t teaching high school. While our welders and riveters were building missiles, they weren’t building bridges, schools, and hospitals. And the best part of all – the companies that made these things – they knew they would never be tested. It didn’t really matter if they blew up halfway to Moscow, or turned around and hit Pittsburg. The shitstorm on Judgment Day would be thick enough to cover any incompetence. Yeah, we feel sorry for the Easter Islanders. But next to doomsday, cannibalism sounds appetizing.

[admin]

CREATIVITY VERSUS COPYRIGHTS, by Charles Carreon

04/20/09



Creativity is the product of greed. That’s what Hollywood, the moviemakers and industry tell us every day. They tell us that if we don’t give them an endless stream of “royalties,” we’ll die in a wasteland devoid of creativity. The radio will go silent, the TV will go blank, cable channels will dry up, movie theatres will be nothing but places to buy overpriced candy and popcorn. Why? Because, these media pushers tell us, they won’t have any incentive to “create content.”

Well, let’s just think about that for a minute. Did creativity begin when the copyright office starting registering copyrights? Did musicians wait to write music until they could get studio contract? Did theater start when Cecil B. DeMille filmed Ben Hur? Gee, I don’t think so.

In fact, the first book to get a copyright was Don Quixote, and the reason it got a copyright was because Miguel de Cervantes, the author, gave a copy to the King of Spain, and the King of Spain liked it so much, he asked Cervantes if there was anything he wanted, because he was the King, and he would give it to him, and Cervantes, being pretty smart, asked if he could have the exclusive right to publish the book for what must have seemed like a long time – twenty years. And the King said, sure, I’ll do that, and he put it right in the introduction to the book, and he signed it, “I, the King.” “Yo, El Rey.”

Man, that’s classy, and legitimate. Twenty years, and after that – boom – into the public domain. Why? Maybe because he hoped that Cervantes would be motivated to write another book. Maybe because he thought that more people would read it if all the publishers of Spain were able to publish the book. So the story of the Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, thought to be one of the greatest books ever written, was written without the incentive of a copyright. The copyright was only awarded after the fact as a reward for work well done.

In fact, if we look at how creativity works, we see that this whole idea that it is stimulated by greed is just nonsense. Go to a kindergarten, and watch kids fingerpainting, or making collages, or learning how to play the recorder. What’s in it for them? Where’s the payoff? Somebody clue me in – who’s greasin’ these kids?

Hmmm. It’s a mystery – well maybe it’s not real creativity – poor quality of workmanship – fit only for the refrigerator door. Well, let’s leave the schoolhouse and go watch some grownups in Little Theatre working through some Shakespeare – a little Romeo and Juliet -- “What light from yonder window breaks?” Maybe some Julius Caesar -- “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” And my personal favorite, from Richard the Third, “and cry HAVOC! And let slip the dogs of war…” Hehe, I love that one – just stirs the blood, doesn’t it? And my point was that it was a good thing Shakespeare was able to copyright his works, eh? He wouldn’t have written them, otherwise. Oh, wait a minute – in Queen Elizabeth’s time there were no copyrights. Well, what a goddamn fool he was. Should have just kept it bottled up inside that old bald forehead of his. If he’d had a copyright, he wouldn’t have had to write so many damn plays. Could have just written one big hit and mined the hell out of it. Dumbass.

All of the great classical music, of course, would never have been written without copyrights, though, right? I mean, Mozart? Bach? Brahms? Beethoven? Surely those great musical geniuses were incentivized by the hope of receiving a huge stream of royalties? Or at least sales of sheet music. No? They wrote for patrons who played the music themselves and shared it with their friends? For churches that played it for free? Allowed it to just be copied and resold by strangers with no obligation to send the check to the early equivalent of BMI, or ASCAP?

Wait a minute – we gotta suppress this information! We’ve got to make people think that without copyrights, writers and musicians and visual artists and actors would never be creative at all -- they’d go directly to drugs and alcohol without stopping to produce any books, songs, pictures, plays or movies. They’ve got to make people think that you can’t make a movie if you can’t raise a 100 Million bucks to blow up a a few helicopters and blow a hot blonde and some stud with a pistol in his hand out the window of a skyscraper with a huge fireball about to engulf them, simulating some kind of pyrotechnic orgasm. They’ve got to convince musicians they’re nobody if they can’t make a video with a bunch of hired ass-shakers gyrating around them while they do cool shit like text people and feel themselves up and wander around their house showing off how many pairs of shoes they have. They’ve got to convince actors that they’ll never get an acting job unless they get a nose job or a boob job or give a producer a y-know job. They’ve got to convince you that all of this is entertainment and you wouldn’t want anything different.

And they’re so afraid that you’ll spend a little time with yourself, actually creating. That’s why they keep telling you – give us money, and leave the creating to us. But they’re not creating – there’s no money in that – and where are you going to find another Jim Morrison, another Elvis Presley, another Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, or Syd Barrett? Those guys are all dead – dumbass – we don’t have to pay them any more than we pay Mickey Mouse – we just keep selling their stuff over and over and over. And when they don’t want to die fast enough, we play ‘em for laughs, like Britney and Jacko, we ignore them like Prince. But there are some guys who know how to reinvent themselves – and they stay ahead of the game – like Puff Daddy, I mean P. Diddy, I mean Diddy, soon he’s gon’ be “Diddy Wah Diddy,” or Don’t Know Diddley – at any rate, there’s no need to kill a guy like that – he’s just proves the point we’re tryin’ to make – without a production company to put you up there, you’re nobody.

[admin]

FORGET GOLD! WATERBOARD BANKERS!, by Charles Carreon

04/25/09



https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 74eVMqm9q0

GOLD. My friend Mark asked me whether it would be a good idea to go back on the gold standard. Mark, I said, that would be a great waste of gold. Think about it – what would happen if we went back on the gold standard? Take note, it wouldn’t work unless all the nations in the world did it, and that would mean that for every dollar the US puts in circulation, and every Euro the Eurpoean Union puts in circulation, every peso that Mexico circulates, etcetera, every country, would have to set aside a large supply of solid gold bullion, very large amounts of it, humongous amounts, really, in huge vaults. Security would be an enormous issue, and the gold would be unavailable for any other purpose. While we had it in the vault, we couldn’t use it to manufacture medical, scientific, or consumer devices or for jewelry. It would be totally wasted, sitting there for what? Symbolic purposes. Totally symbolic purposes. And to back all the money currently in circulation, of course, the price of gold would skyrocket to around a hundred thousand dollars an ounce. Alternatively, you could drastically reduce the money supply, which would mean a Starbucks would cost like ten cents, Obama would get paid about fifty dollars a month, and the AIG bailout would only cost around a hundred and eighty million.

But let’s say we’re willing to leave the world’s store of value in the care of a trusted gang of mercenaries like Blackwater (that has, by the way, changed its name to Xe – and just as an aside, you know, the owner of Blackwater is a guy named Prince, so he might actually become the hired killer formerly known as Prince if they take the quest for corporate anonymity far enough, but let’s return to the topic at hand – gold). Let’s give the devil his or her due – what would be the purpose of going back on the gold standard? Well, it would slow the growth of the money supply down to however fast the Canadians (who pretty much control the ecologically devastating mining industry) could tear up the planet to get that hundred-thousand-dollar-an-ounce shiny stuff, and of course, you could weigh it, and with a hand calculator you could figure out how many dollars the bankers would have to share. Leverage would be constrained. The money-lending business would have limits. A huge stack of bullion in a room surrounded with armed guards would perform a symbolic function that takes the place of – takes the place of what? Of honest bookkeeping.

Honest bookkeeping – that’s all we need. People talk about going back to barter, but it doesn’t have to be that primitive. Let’s imagine there’s a market in town, a farmer’s market. It works this way. You have to bring something to the market to trade. The market will open at seven a.m. Everyone sets their price in a unit of value we’ll call a “Mercator,” or Mercs for short So I can put my tomatoes on sale for 3 pounds for a merc. The butcher will offer lamb shanks for 3 mercs a pound, etc. No money changes hands. Instead, every time there’s a sale made, we call for a transactor, and he or she records the transaction in a book. Sales will be made all day long, and at 3 o’clock the market closes. The transactors do the books, and all the balances are reconciled. The transactors go around and give each merchant a statement of their daily balance and transactions completed. If anyone has a negative balance, then they have to either make it up from their merc account, or take a loan from the transactors, or cancel the transaction. Then all goods will change hands at, say 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, we could do all this on computers, in real time, at a data clearinghouse, and have no one show up anywhere, and take delivery at scheduled dates and times. We could do it with million-ton shipments of tomatoes and tankers full of oil. In fact – big dirty secret – large companies and nations do it all the time. Cuba and Venezuela swap oil for medicine, Israel and China swap metals for weapons. Long, long ago, before the US entered the Second World war against Germany, the US swapped bombsights for industrial diamonds, and that trade worked out beautifully – the Nazis used the diamonds to cut steel into weapons that killed Americans, and the Americans used the bombsights to drop bombs on German civilians. You see, when there’s a war to get done, the merchants of death won’t let a lack of cash get in the way.

My point is, that money is a substitute for honest bookkeeping. In a straight barter deal, there’s no bookkeeping. To facilitate multiparty exchange, though, you need a market, and for a market to function smoothly, you need a unit of value for the purely mathematical purpose of reducing all transactions, literally, to a single common denominator. I know I went over your head there if you flunked third grade math, but if so, it’s time to hit the books, because you’ve been getting shafted since you let your buddies count the popsicle money. The common denominator, that unit, has had a lot of names – usually going back to a word for “weight.” A “peso,” literally means a “weight” of silver or gold. A “dollar” is a word for “tollar,” meaning a unit of ten weights. If you buy hash or opium in India, they will still sell you a “tollar,” which is ten grams. Gold was perfect. When you weren’t using it to trade, you could hang it on your woman or your slave. But money became popular. Why? Because people cheat.

The King dealt with cheating like this – he said – I’m going to make a coin, and stamp my royal symbol on it. This coin will be made of pure gold, silver or copper, and it will be marked on both sides with my symbol, so you can’t shave off a piece of it and pass it off as a complete coin. It will be of a regulation size, so if it’s any smaller than that, it’s not a real coin, or it’s been shaved. And to be sure that it’s made of real gold, it will be of a specified weight. If it looks like a gold coin, but it’s not the right weight, it’s counterfeit. And if you counterfeit my money, I will cut your hand off, or hang you, or both. These were ways of preventing cheats from screwing with the all-important fulcrum of exchange – a true, unchanging common denominator. The King didn’t know it, but he was relying on the absolute, unchangeable and unique atomic weights of pure metals, something that has to do with their atomic structure, to prevent counterfeiting. That is a very good hedge against cheating.

As you can see, when you have gold in circulation this way, it’s always available to be melted down and turned into jewelry. Or if you had jewelry, and you wanted money for it, you could give it to the King’s mint, and he would give you back money stamped with the King’s head.

And it is absolutely true what the gold bugs say, that when the French financiers created paper money, it was the beginning of widespread financial fraud. Since then, the workingperson has had to deal with the value of their money going up or down based on the scams of financiers who have sharper pencils and bigger record books, and who now use computers to pyramid deals that completely undermine the reliable value of that common denominator that is the basis of all exchange. We will never return to gold as a standard of value, but it would behoove us to adopt stern rules to enforce honest bookkeeping. I’m not saying cut off hands, or hang people, but how about a little waterboarding? I hear the CIA waterboarded Al Zubaydah 183 times, and as a result, he provided a lot of useful information. If we waterboarded bankers, they might be able to tell us how all that “wealth” they “created” just happened to disappear. And that would be really useful.

[admin]

TORTURE, WITCHCRAFT, ALTERNATE REALITY & THE REAL PNAC, by Charles Carreon

04/27/09



We are now face to face with the reality that US intelligence agents and hired brutes tortured hundreds of people, and fed an epidemic of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that they were armed with legal authorizations signed by a President who thought he had been chosen by God to fight a Holy War, encouraged by lawyers who deliberately misinterpreted the Constitution in order to turn our country into a place that Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini would have been comfortable running.

If there were torture trials, the torturers would defend themselves the same way the German Nazis did at Nuremberg, by saying they were just following orders, and that somehow, they had managed to believe that it was all justified in the name of defending the United States of America. The fact that Obama would basically say, in advance, that he would grant them that defense, should be enough to make it clear that the current President is not exactly an idealist or a believer in justice as a value that supersedes all others. But that’s for another video. Let’s stick with the theme of torture, witchcraft, alternate reality and the Project for the New American Century. We’ll start with torture.

If history tells us anything, it is that every nation can stray into it under the right stimulus. In recent history, Argentina lost 15,000 people to its dirty war. If we imagine the torture chamber, and how it works, you can imagine the unique, special sense of power it gives the torturer. Not to kill, not to extinguish the breath in a man or woman’s body, but to keep it alive, to take the flame of consciousness, and turn the victim’s own awareness into a blowtorch of agony. Life itself is the torturer’s vehicle. His visits are feared. At the sound of his steps, the victim trembles. Gradually or quickly, his whole psyche crumbles, becomes a reflection of the torturer’s godlike power.

Vampiristically, the torturer feasts upon the psychic remains of his victims, and feels himself almost immortal, standing on the other side of terror, agony, and despair, safe in the land of the comfortable, self-controlled, righteous.

That’s the subjective side of it. Don’t let them tell you that these guys hated doing it. No one had to do it. Those who did, did so willingly. But of course, they had their orders to fall back on. Orders to do what? To find the culprits? To unwind plots? To find terrorists? No, that’s not why. If you’ve been reading about this, you’ll know that the “extreme interrogation techniques” used by the CIA and their “contractors” were adopted from Chinese Communist techniques to induce false confessions. The US military had studied these techniques in order to find out how imprisoned American soldiers, held captive by North Korea, had been induced to sign false confessions and make apparently voluntary, but utterly false “confessions.” And the Bush Interrogators were also trying to prove a lie – the existence of a vast, worldwide terrorist threat.

Roll back the centuries to the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, the days when this book, The Malleus Maleficarum, was the manual for witch prosecutors. Torture was said to be necessary for every witness, or at least the threat of it. Why? Because of course, there were no witches, and to get people to swear, under oath, that they and their neighbors were witches, torture was absolutely necessary. People just wouldn’t make up stuff like that unless they were tortured. But the mission of the Inquisition was not, theoretically, an evil one. The purpose was actually to prove the existence of the Devil, to give concrete evidence of what the Bible says.

An Inquisitor could actually make God’s vision manifest. What good were the Bible’s tales if no-one could testify to their truth? The Inquisitor, with hammer and tongs, could get the Witches, who knew the Devil directly, to admit their association. The horrific, and salacious tales of demonic sex could be explored in detail. Take a man, a man thought to be upright, a man thought to be faithful to his wife, stretch him on the rack, tie him to the dunking stool, put his foot in an iron boot and heat it over the coals, and then the would come vileness spilling out. He would admit to fornicating with a beautiful female demon, a succubus, night after night. Another witness, a pregnant farmgirl, would be trapped in more lies. The real father would take the stand to deny that he had sex with her. Under torture, she would at last admit to having had sex with a male demon, an incubus, at the Witch’s Sabbath, and thus had conceived the Devil’s spawn. It’s all here in the Malleus, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, who received their authorization from Pope Innocent who declared, in something called a “Papal Bull” the existence of an Alternate Reality that only heretics could disbelieve. Listen to this:

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Tréves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.

This is a lot like a Presidential Finding on terrorism. It declares a state of emergency all over Europe, and it blames everything that’s going wrong on – Witches!

So it was with the US interrogators. They started from the assumption that Bush was right, and people who didn’t believe in a worldwide terrorist conspiracy to destroy America were heretics. For a few years after 911, most Americans, fortified with daily doses of Fox’s alternative vision of reality, agreed. But over the long term, in order to keep the United States in a state of terror, to feed military spending and keep on with that Project for the New American Century, they needed “evidence.” They hadn’t found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they hadn’t unraveled the 911 plot. The Bush alliance with the Saudis meant they couldn’t investigate in Saudi Arabia to find the real terror financiers behind the box-cutter gang. They needed to find evidence to support that Fox News alternate reality, and answer the important questions that Bush had planted in our minds: Why do they hate us? What are their plans? When will they strike again? With that information, they could claim to have captured real terrorists, people who were in league with the enemies of America.

But the plan went awry. The Afghan male is a tough nut to crack. Insult, injury, humiliation are like fertilizer to his character. They weren’t European farmers and shepherds, suddenly betrayed by their own companions. They were a different type of torture subject. The setting was different. In isolation, they found solidarity. In their Holy Book, they took refuge. They refused to eat. They refused to lie. They held their captors in contempt. Like mosquitoes trying to draw blood from a stone sculpture, the interrogators failed. And thank God it did, because we, the citizens of America, were the real targets of the Guantanamo project. Not only was it a place to train torturers who could be unleashed in this country, it was a testing ground for how we would tolerate the introduction of torture into our political life.

The plan, my friends, was for torture to leak upstream into our own nation. Think not, my friends, that the mission was to end in Guantanamo. Far from it. That was the pilot. The main show would run in Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, places where prison camps and private contractors would be happy to spread the Gospel of Torture, and really get on with building their own alternative history, the real New American Century.

[admin]

MARK LEVIN ON SPECTER'S DEFECTION, by Charles Carreon

05/05/09



Okay, the first thing I wonder is why Mark Levin plays stadium rock at the beginning of his show, and claims to be broadcasting from “a bunker under the brick and steel of a nondescript building.” And the answer comes to me at once – rock is, like it or not, the music of rebellion, and he is pretending to be a voice from what we used to call “the Underground,” and nowadays refer to as “the Resistance.” In fact, Mark Levin is a stooge for the rich, a phony rebel with a whiny voice that would identify him as a sellout in any venue other than one where spouting bullshit is the norm.

I’m here to respond to his sermon to the faithful about how the loss of Arlen Specter as a Republican Senator is no problem for the Republicans. Let’s start with a view from the reality zone, a place Levin avoids like cats avoid water – Specter is one powerful dude, and smarter than hell. Time and again we have seen him feint left, veer right, and head downcourt to sink the shot for the Republicans. He has the ability to sound like the voice of reason. He’s a graduate of Yale Law School, an Air Force veteran, and the twefth most senior member of the Senate. He is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Committee on Veteran’s Affairs, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Just take the Judiciary Committee position – he is top dog on the committee that will clear all Obama’s nominees to the Federal bench, including the next Supreme Court Justice who will replace outgoing Justice Souter. If this were a chess game, the Republicans just lost more than a bishop or a knight – they lost a rook, and they are going to miss him. But Levin’s listeners won’t get the facts, they’ll get this silly accusation, which would be true of any politician, and coming from Levin, sounds like a candid self-description:

AUDIO EXCERPT

People who disagree with Levin fall into two categories, “dishonest or delusional.” The truth as revealed to Levin by Reagan’s ghost, no doubt, is that the party has become a minority party because it has tried to be “all things to all people,” a process that has been going on “since 1989, the end of the Reagan era.”

AUDIO EXCERPT

Tell you what – I really want to give Mark Levin a chance hear, so I’m gonna look at his picture and try to surrender to his charisma. Oh, yeah, now it’s working. I remember it all now. Yeah, I remember the last eight years under Bush – what did we call him – “The Uniter,” wasn’t it? Riiiiiight, Mark, Karl Rove, closet Democrat, Dick Cheney, always making concessions, and Alberto Gonzales claiming to approve of torture, but actually a mole for the ACLU. It feels so good to re-imagine reality – this is better than believing in the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or Kaballah – under the influence of Levin, I can believe anything!

Y’know, he has such ability to turn a phrase, the way he artfully flips sentence structures, that it overpowers my resistance. Listen to this:

AUDIO EXCERPT

Doomed! That’s straight out of the comic books! Zap, Pow, Kaboom! Doom!

And with that, Specter is history. Or less than history. Just roadkill on the political highway, scum under Levin’s boot. With the scum out of the way, he’s ready to get back to his important job, after selling fish oil, of course -- shilling for the rich. Listen to this – and this time, to accentuate the delivery, I’ll give you a little visual accompaniment:

AUDIO EXCERPT

God, Mark is mad about those bailouts! Yes, the billions that have been given away – that’s not what’s bothering him. The problem is, he wants the money for corporations and banks to be FREE FREE FREE! And to hell with the people who build the cars – the autoworkers – they don’t need to be Incentivized, they don’t need bonuses to keep them going in their pathetic little jobs. They aren’t bankers who have a necessary role in the future reorganization of the company. NO NO NO NO NO! Only people who wear pinstriped suits get to receive massive funding and retention bonuses – if you give power or money to the blue collar guys – that’s Communism! It’s okay to bailout banks, but not to demand stock in them. You can pour money down Wall Street’s throat, but you can’t ask them to do a flinkin’ thing.

And nightmare of nightmares, the government wants to provide people with health care. Bummer bummer bummer. Only old people should get health care. Only drug companies should receive massive infusions of federal funding through prescription drug buying deals. There’s a flu sweeping the nation, but I personally will be better off if the person flipping my burger, coughing on my lettuce, pays for his own healthcare – or doesn’t.

The government is stealing the wealth of future generations, as well as our own wealth, shouts Mark! Is he talking about the additional 600,000 unemployed people who have lost their jobs every month since the beginning of the year – that’s 20,000 a day? Hell no! They don’t have any stinkin’ wealth to lose. Maybe he’s worried about the 500,000 homeowners in Arizona, Nevada, California, Florida and Illinois – who received foreclosure notices in the first three months of this year. No, he’s not talking about them. Their wealth is gone, but the government didn’t take it the bankers did.

And Mark works for the bankers night and day, deflecting the righteous hatred of his listeners towards some Obama-shaped boogeyman, some hate-able liberal socialized megalith that came outta Washington and ate their wallet. They just want their pride back, their jobs back, their clear black-and-white, us-versus-them posture. Hell, they don’t know what they want. They don’t understand politics. But when they listen to Mark, with his fancy turns of phrase, stirring exhortations to stand for principle, they think they do. And when Mark drops his voice low, and asks “what we’ve come to,” at this point in our national life, they can imagine themselves standing straight and tall, like one of the Minutemen, like Paul Revere, or Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, or Sam Adams. But in those days, guys like Levin weren’t talking revolution. They were talking about how the King’s rule was just, and holding forth about the rights that we had as Colonists under the crown. Because guys like Mark, who play rock music, but hate real rebels, who talk about how we’ve lost our freedoms, but shill for the rich, are not patriots – they’re bullshit artists. Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams would know him for a poser, and a dangerous one at that.

[admin]

PORNOGRAPHERS INFRINGE EMILY TRADEMARK AND MATTEL IS SILENT -- HOW SWELL IS THAT?, by Charles Carreon

05/19/09

Barbie’s Neglected Cousin Lacks A Champion

Will the real Emily Doll please stand up?



Remember the slogan, “You can tell it’s Matell — It’s Swell!” Well, it doesn’t seem very swell that young girls who do an online search for “Emily Doll” on Google, get this result — after the one paid spot, the first three entries are for porn sites!



The first two Google links go to the EmilyDoll.com website, that is owned by the same guy who owns TeenDolls.com.





The TeenDolls.com website is the mothership for EmilyDoll.com and other sites like it -- AlyssaDoll.com and BaileyDoll.com. This image below has been modified with a couple of clouds to conceal what is revealed at EmilyDoll.com, and it would take only a few clicks for a young girl curious enough to explore the mysteries of EmilyDoll.com to discover a new role model.



I’ve got to say John Albright has more nerve than sense. After all, there’s a Federal law, the The Truth In Domain Names Act of 2003, authored by no less an eminence than Senator Orrin Hatch, that seems to address this sort of conduct. Thinking perhaps this might be of importance to Mattel, I sent the following email to Mattel’s trademark lawyer:



Strangely enough, this email drew no response from Mr. Moore. Two weeks later, I called and left a message with his secretary, one of those detailed messages whereby you communicate the gravity of your concerns. But like a coin dropped down an exceedingly deep well, my inquiries werereciprocated by the silence of the tomb. Finally, I put my blogger’s hat on, and sent him a letter with a few questions, explicitly referencing the cybersquatting law and Truth In Domain Names Act:



I was particularly surprised by Mattel’s laissez faire attitude to the infringement of its registered trademark, because Barbie has always been such an aggressive litigator. Like in that BarbiesPlaypen.com case — it’s a landmark case, and Mattel’s rep for kicking the stuffing out of any clown stupid enough to play porn games with the Barbie name is legendary. See Ellen Rony’s comments on the topic in the Domain Name Handbook. But when I looked on the US Patent & Trademark website and found that Mr. Moore was the trademark godfather for both of these young ladies — Emily and Barbie — I couldn’t help but wonder — why doesn’t Emily merit any protection? Is it only the slender-hipped, bullet-bra type that gets any respect in Hollywood? Is a little girl not worthy of a little trademark muscle from the company legal department?



Well, if Mattel’s just going to play Humpty Dumpty



and sit on the wall while unscrupulous operators lure little girls into the skin trade, you might want to give them a hand to get off it. Adult websites certainly have their place in our world, but not at the top of a search page for “Emily Doll,” with a design and typestyle that is clearly meant to lure young girls into viewing what the law classes as harmful material.

U.S. Code

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 110 > § 2252B

§ 2252B. Misleading domain names on the Internet

How Current is This? (a) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

(b) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

(c) For the purposes of this section, a domain name that includes a word or words to indicate the sexual content of the site, such as “sex” or “porn”, is not misleading.

(d) For the purposes of this section, the term “material that is harmful to minors” means any communication, consisting of nudity, sex, or excretion, that, taken as a whole and with reference to its context—

(1) predominantly appeals to a prurient interest of minors;

(2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and

(3) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

(e) For the purposes of subsection (d), the term “sex” means acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, or physcial [1] contact with a person’s genitals, or the condition of human male or female genitals when in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] So in original. Probably should be “physical”.

I can’t seem to get Michael Moore’s interest, but if some other people, like angry moms, started filling his inbox with complaints, it might make a difference.

And there’s always the government. A quick search of “enforcement of truth in domain name act of 2003″ lead me to a link where I found this:

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, NATIONAL CENTER FOR MISSING & EXPLOITED CHILDREN LAUNCH EFFORT AIMED AT MISLEADING DOMAIN NAMES

WASHINGTON, DC - April 20, 2004 - As part of an ongoing effort to crack down on websites that deceive minors into viewing pornographic and obscene materials, the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) announced today that the National Center's CyberTipline, a reporting mechanism for child sexual exploitation, will now feature the ability to receive reports from the public on misleading Internet domain names.

The new reporting feature was added today to the National Center's CyberTipline, accessible at http://www.cybertipline.com, or by calling 1-800-THE LOST (1-800-843-5678). The addition was prompted by a DOJ initiative, led by the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Criminal Division, to crack down on misleading domain names following enactment of the Prosecutorial Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of Children Today Act (the "PROTECT Act") on April 30, 2003.

Among other things, the PROTECT Act created a new federal law, codified at Title 18, Section 2252B of the United States Code, that makes it a crime to knowingly use a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors on the Internet. This crime carries a penalty of up to four years in prison and/or a fine. An offender might commit this crime, for example, by using a domain name that features the name of a popular children's cartoon character, purposefully misspelled, and leads to a website featuring materials harmful to minors. The new law also makes it a crime to use a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive any person into viewing obscenity, which carries a penalty of up to two years imprisonment and/or a fine.

"The Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are taking this step today to protect children from dangerous and inappropriate experiences on the Internet," said Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Now, alert and concerned parents can help law enforcement identify and dismantle these misleading Internet sites that are set up to lure their children into viewing obscene materials."

"This new feature will allow the public to take an even more active role in helping law enforcement clean up the Internet and protect our children," said Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray of the Criminal Division.

"Though the Internet is full of educational and fun experiences for kids, there are individuals who misuse the Web to prey upon children's vulnerabilities," stated NCMEC President Ernie Allen. "We now have the means to combat this threat to kids, and with the public's help the CyberTipline will be even more effective as a bridge between law enforcement and concerned citizens."

The Department of Justice continues to prosecute violators of the Truth In Domain Names provisions of the PROTECT Act. In February 2004, John Zuccarini was sentenced by a federal judge in Manhattan to 30 months in prison on charges that he created and used misleading domain names on the Internet to deceive minors into logging on to pornographic websites. Those domain names included close misspelling of domains names that are popular with children, such as "www.dinseyland.com," (a variation on Disney Land's website) and "www.bobthebiulder.com," and "www.teltubbies.com" (variations on the websites for "Bob the Builder" and "Teletubbies").

The new feature has been added to the CyberTipline, which already provides members of the public a means to report child exploitation crimes, including the trafficking of child pornography, online enticement of children, child prostitution, child sex tourism, non-family child sexual molestation, and obscenity sent to children. Since its inception in March 1998 through April 2004, the CyberTipline has processed more than 230,000 reports of child exploitation crimes, a large number of which have been sufficient to refer to law enforcement for investigation.

CONTACT:
http://www.usdoj.gov
CRM 202-514-2008
TDD 202-514-1888

And Don’t Forget The Importance of Statistics

If anyone asks you how you know that young people under the age of 18 are being lured into EmilyDoll.com, tell them that according to QuantCast.com, 11% of the thirty-five hundred visitors to EmilyDoll.com every month are between the ages of 12 and 17. That would be 350 a month, or more than ten per day, or one every couple of hours. See the chart below and click it for more information at the main quantcast.com website.

[admin]

RANDOMNESS -- A MYTH SCIENTISTS CREATED TO SIMULATE IGNORANCE
by Charles Carreon
06/01/09



"Chance is but our ignorance of causes." -- Lamarck

May I propose a bet? I bet you think that life is kind of random. Even if you’re religious, and think that not a sparrow falls except it is marked by your father-figure in heaven, or that the All-knowing Maha-Kleptonanda keeps track of it all in the infallible Karmic Record, fundamentally you think that what comes next is no more knowable than the next roll of the dice or number about to come up in a lotto game. And as a result, you think that life is “random.” So I won the bet, right? Well now, give me three more minutes, and I’ll prove you wrong, and you’ll be so satisfied with my argument you’ll kiss the concept of randomness goodbye forever. Ready?

Randomness is a mathematically created concept used to simulate ignorance. What do I mean by that? Well, just imagine that you live where I live, on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood where it’s easy to get lost. All day long, cars come through the cul-de-sac and they don’t stop. They just buzz through, obviously lost. Now if I were to write down all the car license numbers and give them to a math professor or an investigator on a list, and ask them to tell me what they all had in common, they couldn’t figure it out. They would just say they were random. But there’s nothing random about them. They were all cars driven by people who were lost in my neighborhood, almost certainly looking for someone else’s address nearby, but not on our cul-de-sac. Every car was driven by a person loaded with intention, not some random cruiser out to see what the front of my house looks like. Nothing random about them, but if you were ignorant of how I compiled the list of license plate numbers, you’d just have to assume they were random.

Take another example. We’re sitting on a park bench in front of a pond, and it’s just starting to rain. I ask you, “Where will the next drop fall?” You say, “I don’t know.” Or maybe you say, “How the hell would I know?” Right then, the next drop falls, making a ripple on the surface of the pond. Well, that wasn’t a random event. That raindrop had been falling out of the clouds for miles, and finally, it reached its destination, after being buffeted by crosswinds and polluted with dust, falling and falling with perfect purpose toward its inevitable collision with the surface of the pond. Nothing random about that. At no point did anything random happen to that raindrop, because everything other event that took place that affected the speed and direction of its fall, and determined the moment and place of its contact with the surface of the pond, were all, equally non-random. But since both you and I were ignorant of all of those factors, we simply say, “It’s random.”

To finish my explanation, I have to explain why I say it’s a “mathematically created concept used to simulate ignorance.” Here’s what I mean by that. Mathematics is not a process for generating random outcomes. It is a system for generating and analyzing determinable outcomes. Remember that’s what’s so awful about math – only one right answer – and you don’t know it. You might wish that math problems could be solved with random answers, but you could only peddle that notion in literature class, not math class. Computers are big calculators with clever layers of articulation laid over them called interfaces. You might, logically, conclude that computers have a hard time with the concept of randomness. Actually it’s worse than that, and I’ll now indulge in a literary digression. It’s said that Samuel Johnson once criticized someone’s book, and some nice person next to him said that he should be more charitable in his assessment, because it had been very difficult to write it. “Difficult!” Johnson retorted, “I wish it had been impossible!” Well, that’s how it is with computers and random numbers. It’s not only difficult for computers to generate a random number – it’s impossible.

Computer programmers know this, so they have these things they call “random number generators,” but all they do is generate a number that is good enough to be impossible for you to predict. In other words, since you are ignorant of how the computer generates the number, it’s as unpredictable as where the next raindrop will fall on the pond, or what the number of the license plate of the next car will be when it drives through my cul-de-sac. That’s just because you don’t know all the variables that would go into generating a solution. Since mathematicians want to generate solutions even to problems where there are too many variables, they turn dark holes of ignorance into wells of randomness. They start pulling numbers out of a hole, and say that since no one can predict which one will be next, there’s no order to it. It would be more honest for them to say that they do not know the order, but they’re too proud to do that, so they have enshrined the notion of randomness in mathematics as a tool for predicting outcomes using the data that is available. But it doesn’t mean that randomness is real. It’s not. Everything has a cause, nothing comes from nothing, and you shouldn’t confuse a mathematical tool with a cosmic reality.